This Ragged Life Renewed: A Memoir of Rebellion, Faith, Loss, and Starting Over
Some memoirs tidy the past until it shines. This one does not. This Ragged Life Renewed is my true account of a restless childhood in Utah, years on the street, a winter night that changed my life, and the losses that came after I thought the hard part was already over.
I started writing this story in 1999. I released the first version in 2001 under a plain title: This Ragged Life Renewed, a spiritual cleansing of a fallen man. After my youngest brother, Justin, died in 2002, I updated it and put it online. I kept revising it, including a 2003 version and a 2009 edition. I was not trying to write literature. I was trying to tell the truth about where I came from.
That first book was about dying to my old life and finding a new life in Christ. Its story ended before Justin died. This edition keeps that story. I have tidied the writing so it reads cleanly, but it is the story I told then, in the order it happened, and nothing in it has been made prettier than it was. Then it goes on past the point where the first book ended, through everything that has happened since, to where I stand today. It is for my five children. It closes with a letter to them, and with poems I wrote in earlier years.
The night the car died, and then started
The prologue begins just after Christmas in 1998, on a highway near Deer Park, Washington, not far from Spokane. I was out on a test drive in an old car I meant to buy in installments. I had no license. The car had no registration. There was no traction left on the tires. When I tried to turn around and head home, I slid off the road into an icy embankment. I flooded the carburetor, and the car died.
I was stuck there for about forty-five minutes. A blizzard was nearly on top of me. I knew that if I flagged down the highway patrol, the car would be impounded, and I might get a ticket or go to jail. Inspired by kind people I had met, and by the testimonies they had shared about the Lord's mercy, I prayed. As best I can remember, I said: "God, I need you now more than ever. If you want me to know you, please reach out to me in this dire situation."
After I prayed, I felt the comfort of the Lord. I tried the car again, and it started immediately. Even with those bald tires, it did not hesitate getting back onto the road. I drove straight back to the owners' house and pulled into the same driveway I had taken it from. There, in the driveway, it died. "That night changed my life," I wrote. The road that brought me there began long before I ever reached Washington.
What came before, and what came after
I grew up behind what people call the Zion Curtain, a restless kid in a struggling family. From the time I was six months old we were on the move. By the time I was five, we had lived in three different states and more homes than I can count. You cannot make friends easily when you never stay long enough to keep them.
As a young man I ended up on the streets. I ate at ministries like Cup of Cool Water in Seattle. One night under the I-90 bridge I was beaten and stabbed for a backpack that held everything I owned. The book does not dress that period up as adventure. It is the record of a young man who was good at rebelling, even when rebellion made his own life worse, and of the people who fed him anyway.
What followed was marriage, children, and businesses built side by side. Then came a drunk driver on Interstate 5 who left me with forty-two fractures. Back-to-back hurricanes took everything my family had in Puerto Rico. A marriage of nearly eighteen years came to an end. This edition carries the story through those years without pretending they were a tidy sequel to a conversion story.
The early chapters stay close to the family I came from. My father entered his marriage to my mother after a painful divorce, and the pain of being separated from children was already part of our house. My mother was nineteen, only a few years older than my father's oldest child. They married when my dad was thirty-one. I arrived as a responsibility neither of them needed at the time, and we kept moving anyway. The book does not turn that beginning into a speech about fate. It just tells how a lonely way of growing up made it easier to leave, and harder to stay.
I also write about the work and the wreckage that came later, because a conversion story that stops at the side of the road would be only half true. I first told this story for myself. This edition carries it forward for my five children, so they can have the record in my own words: what I got wrong, what I have learned, and the faith I have held on to through all of it. The letter at the end is for them. The poems are from earlier years, when I was still learning how to tell the truth on the page.
I still hold the faith I asked for on that icy road. I also tell what I got wrong, and what I have learned since. If you are looking for a memoir that turns pain into a slogan, this is not that book. If you want an honest account of rebellion, faith, loss, and renewal, written for the children who have to live with the consequences, this is the one I could stand behind.
I have revised this book more than once because my life did not stop in 2001. The 2002, 2003, and 2009 versions were part of that. This edition is the one I want in print for the people who have to live with the story, not only for the people who watched me try to tell it online. If you have ever needed a second start, and then a third, you will recognize the shape of it. The title is the promise I am still trying to keep: a ragged life, renewed, without pretending the scars were never there.
More books by Ryan Richard Thompson
- Echoes of Power: Paul, Rome, and the making of the early Church, with the first edition's mistakes corrected in the open.
- The Unsettled Story: Ancient scriptures and the questions they leave open.
- The Transparent Future: A novel about trust in a city that measures honesty.
- Pillars of Strength: Fatherhood, family distance, and the weight of truth.
- The Gravity of Sacrifice: A published Mars novel about a father and the cost of going.
- The Weight of Evidence: What research can and cannot say about parental alienation.
Buy the book: This Ragged Life Renewed is available in print and ebook at the Disruptarian shop.
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